What will it take to make street food safe and hygienic? Can customers at all distinguish between safe and unsafe food laid out before them? This was the subject of a study led by a team of professors from universities across the globe. And ground zero for their research was Salt Lake Sector V and the Kolkata Municipal Corporation area.
“The project was conducted between 2015 and 2016 and then it took time for the results to be published by Germany’s IZA Institute of Labor Economics and the MIT Press of the US,” said Sudipta Moitra a member of Gana Unnayan Parshad, who was the project leader. The Prashad is an NGO that works on labour welfare, skill development, health, women and child development etc.
The study was titled “Information shocks and street-food safety: a field study in urban India” and the professors leading the research were Gianmarco Daniele of Bocconi University, Milan, Sulagna Mookerjee of Binghamton University, New York, and Denni Tommasi of Australia’s Monash University and Germany’s IZA. The project was funded by InnoAoid, a Denmark-based NGO and Gana Unnayan Parshad was the implementation partner.
The project had three parts, out of which the first was an attempt at designing need-based solutions for vendors. Moitra enumerated some examples: “What sort of wash basin would be ergonomic for hawkers? When customers want to drink, they usually have to scoop water out of a dirty drum (usually second-hand chemical containers) using an equally dirty mug. What sort of water dispenser would be useful to them? What sort of water purifier can they afford?”
The second part of the project tried to link urban hawkers with rural entrepreneurs. “The spices hawkers procure aren’t pure so what if rural businessman can be encouraged to source spices directly from the producers and sell them to the vendors? The same could be done for disposable plates,” Moitra suggested, although adding that this initiative was not too successful as the rural entrepreneurs could not smoothen their supply chain.
The final leg of the project was a study, roping in over 900 vendors. “These hawkers were divided into three groups. One group we trained on safety and hygiene. Another group was both trained and given promotional material such as napkins and posters (endorsing their participation in the study) to stick in their stalls. The third group was not tampered with at all. We simply observed them to see if they were influenced by the other two groups,” he explained.
Where they come from
The average age of the hawkers studied was 41 years, out of which 86 per cent were male and had been working in this sector for an average of 19 years. Fifty-five per cent of them sold light snacks, while 20 per cent sold meals and lesser numbers sold heavy snacks, drinks, fruits, vegetables and sweets.
The study found that since this occupation requires little start-up capital it tends to draw a large section of the poor. The hawkers in the sample had low level of education — 29 per cent had no education at all and only 11 per cent had completed secondary school. This, the study observed, limited their capability for independent knowledge acquisition on food safety. They operate in an informal sector and hence rarely deal with institutional bodies that could provide guidance on the matter.
The day-to-day problems of these vendors was the lack of electricity, toilets, clean water, shortage of capital, competition from other hawkers and extortion by police.
(Inset) A hawker tosses chowmein in a wok at the IT hub.
Debasmita BhattacharjeeHygiene training
At the workshops, the hawkers were introduced to the Street Vendors Act 2014 and informed about their rights as well as the importance of cooperation among themselves to achieve common goals.
They were taught about personal hygiene, cleaning hands, using clean containers for water, covering food, using paper plates and cups, waste management etc. When asked the possible sources of food contamination, 22 per cent of them said bacteria while 10 per cent said water.
A large share of vendors reported a high perceived cost of arranging better facilities — 60 per cent for clean drinking water, 48 per cent for maintaining clean surroundings at the stall, 41 per cent for keeping hands clean, 42 per cent for having a clean cooking area, and 68 per cent for providing disposable utensils and cutlery.
Consumer’s call
The survey also included 1,480 street food consumers, of whom 65 per cent ate there more than once a week and had a regular hawker of choice.
But 44 per cent consumers reported having fallen sick at some point from consuming unsafe street food. While they said they value safer food, almost 70 per cent said it was impossible or difficult to detect whether food was contaminated. They said there were several factors to determining where to eat — taste, price, location and whether the food was healthy and hygienic. But only 37 per cent said that hygiene was the most crucial factor.
Holding them back
All the workshops and counselling had but a small effect on actual behaviour of the hawkers. After the training, researchers went to check if the hawkers had started using tongs, spatula etc instead of hands to cook and serve, if they had bought bigger dustbins, if they had started wearing aprons, if food debris was spotted on the tables, chairs, floor or cooking area, if non-disposable utensils were being washed with soap etc.
The researches found that more than 20 per cent of the sample had discussed food safety among themselves — and there was a marked improvement in awareness —but this never translated in practice. They attributed this to several reasons.
Firstly, there was a lack of incentive to produce safer food as even if they did, the improved quality would be difficult to notice and hence not be rewarded by customers.
There could also be a substitution between effort and advertising. When vendors were provided with promotional material, they felt they had already signaled their quality to customers, therefore making less effort to prove through their food handling that their product was safe.
Also, participation in the project was voluntary and there was no penalty for non-compliance of the safety standards they were taught. “Also, these hawkers have no government recognition or legal standing. Why would they invest in infrastructure when they know they can be asked to vacate the footpath
any day?” says Moitra.
The study concluded that information to vendors is not the key constraint. The lack of basic infrastructure is. Vendors need better access to clean water, waste disposal and electricity. The government needs to take these into account when drafting street food regulations and when deciding vending zones in future.
Further, if the government had designed this food hygiene monitoring project, there may have been better implementation due to the threat of sanctions in case of non-compliance.
Covid effect
The project is about to enter its second phase from April. “Since this is a follow-up of the earlier study we aren’t able to include the pandemic angle into it,” said Moitra, though not denying its effect.
“Business districts like Dalhousie, which have more brick-and-mortar companies, are mostly back in office and so are the hawkers,” he says. It’s IT hubs like Sector V that are still working from home. Many small-scale vendors — maybe those who sold only tea or ghugni — have had to change their profession during the pandemic.
“However, an upside is that since customers are careful about Covid protocol, many vendors have now started keeping hand washes in their stalls, something we have been urging them to do for years,” smiled Moitra.
